I Will Possess Your Heart
by SRC
Summary: The average heart beats seventy two to eighty times in a minute when the body is in a restful state. Dick's heart beats, on average eighty four to ninety two times per minute." Oneshot. Dick/Tim


**Fandom:** DCU (Dick Grayson/Tim Drake).  
**Rating:** PG-13/T for un-requited slash and Tim!Angst, but nothing graphic or bad, I promise.  
**Warning:** This is AU, but it wouldn't hurt to be caught up on Yost's _Red Robin_ arc.  
**Disclaimer:** Standard disclaimers apply. I _really_ don't own anything that you recognize. Promise.  
**Word count:** This weighs in at 701 words.  
**Extras:** Please read and review. Anything you have to say, I want to hear it. Don't hold back.

I Will Possess Your Heart

By: SRC

"You reject my advances and desperate pleas.  
I won't let you, let me down, so easily."

The average heart beats seventy two to eighty times in a minute when the body is in a restful state. Dick's heart beats, on average eighty four to ninety two times per minute. Because, even when the acrobat is sitting still, he is in fact thinking about movement.

Tim knows this because he is counting.

Tim's heart rate increased from his normal ambient rate of sixty four beats per minute, he's always had a mild case of bradycardia, to ninety one as he watched Dick's pale throat, the light but, present flutter of the carotid artery under near translucent skin give off quick pulses. His own heart tripped into acute tachycardia, the feedback loop of his body trying to make up for its increased metabolic demands and equilibrate the pressure of his blood.

He wishes he had the right, the _privilege_, to walk his fingers up the cage of his ribs and let them rest there while he carefully presses the shell of his ear to the top of his sternum and listen to the echoed sounds of the unoxygenated blood push through the tricuspid valve and the newly filtered oxygen enriched blood out of the aortic valve. He _imagines _all of it though, and it's nearly as hypnotizing as a metronome. He wants to feel Dick's diaphragm shift down and out with his full, deep breaths that he takes with powerful lungs. He can imagine his head moving just a _little bit_ from where it rests from between the gymnast's pectoral muscles, because Dick breathes correctly; low and deep within his diaphragm, slow, even and steady. No more then eleven breaths per minute.

And he wishes that he could just swim inside of his beautiful body. Dive through the deep pools of crystal blue irises and travel past the optical nerves until he is floating with the current of blood cells; following them through their essential circuit, its intricate cotillion through capillaries, arteries and veins. Maybe he could hide in one of the chambers of the older man's heart, and never come out, ever.

But he knew that was juvenile thinking and he can only try to slow and control his own shallow breaths that are being ripped from his body. He can only quietly count Dick's heart rate and try hard to avoid looking directly into soft, _pitying _eyes. Tim knows that the heart is just another muscle weighing in at only a meager eleven ounces and only the size of a clenched fist. And just like any muscle, it can be trained. Muscles remember repeated motions, making said motion easier and easier until it's practically parasympathetic. And he wonders how many times his heart has to _break _before it doesn't _hurt _anymore. It only took a few weeks for his body to grow accustom to Batman's training regimen. But it feels like its been _ages _of nearly constant _war _in his chest and it hasn't gotten any less _painful_.

"You just have to think about it, Dick. No one _ever _wants me at _first_... but then they realize how _useful _I am and how I can become what you need... And, I just want to tell you that I'll wait _forever _for you; as long... as long as you need. And I'll take whichever part of you you want to _give _me, even the most acute part. I'll take _anything_." And Tim is forced to take a shuttering breath and wills his own heart to slow down, because it's echoing in his ears and he can't block it out, "And I'll be exactly what you _need_, I promise."

And Dick is staring at him with fucking _empathy_, and he knows that the heart is just a muscle; the organ that was _assigned _romantic meaning by poets is really just a technical double pump that helps run a tenuous, inferior human body. And he knows that it can't actually _break_, the heart, but he wonders if all of the _refusals _and rejection and dismissals, _bruise _it. And if it's hit with these metaphorical missiles so badly, enough times, can it just decided to shut down completely?


End file.
